Quebec firefighter charged with arson

ST-MATHIAS-SUR-RICHELIEU, QUE. — Residents suspected something sinister in the number of fires that had been occurring in the sleepy strip of towns that lie along the Richelieu River.

But no one suspected André Beaudry, a local volunteer firefighter, was behind it.

After dozens of fires stretching over three years, a lengthy police investigation and the event that might have been intended as a firebug’s masterpiece, the trail appears to have literally led police to the trailer park that Beaudry called home in rural St-Mathias-sur-Richelieu, Que., just east of Montreal

Police charged the 30-year-old with arson in late October, alleging he set three fires and may be linked to 26 other suspected arsons between 2009 and 2012.

Everyone knew that “there was a pyromaniac in the area,” said St-Mathias resident Robert Fontaine, 45. He suspected there was a war between local restaurant owners.

“It seemed that all the pizzerias in town were catching fire,” he said.

The charges are still before Quebec courts. The accusation is that Beaudry is part of a notorious and little-studied column of the crime statistics known as fire-setting firefighters. Almost exclusively young men, they can be driven by a range of motivations including thrills, fame, money or the pyromaniac’s psychological urge to start the flames firefighters are duty-bound to extinguish.

In the case against Beaudry, the final fire started at about 4:30 a.m. last March 2. The production manager at Media Module, a sign company, received a call from its alarm service about a fire. First on the scene, he found the flames at the rear of the building in the paint shop.

A few blasts from a fire extinguisher proved futile. The arsonist had cut away part of the building’s brown exterior metal sheeting, giving the fire direct access to the building’s wood structure, said company owner Ralph Eid.

“By noon there was no more building. It was flat.”

Whoever set the fire did leave something behind: a set of large footprints. Those tracks led up to round spot on the ground where the snow had melted away and the fire, presumably, had been started.

Just across the street, tenants above the St-Mathias’ Super 9 nightclub were awakened by a telephone call at the same time as fire crews were being dispatched to the sign company fire. A neighbour had spotted a flaming garbage can outside a rear door of the club, which was closed for renovations and a change of management.

The flames never caught hold and caused only minor damage to the club’s wooden walls, but scratches on an unbreakable side window are signs that the firesetter tried to penetrate the building with a cinder block. And a week earlier, someone had ripped out a small square door behind, which was the club’s generator, and tried to light a fire inside.

“For two weeks we kept watch through the night,” said one female tenant, who requested her name not be published. She stayed up until 2 a.m. Her male housemate, who also asked not to be identified, stood guard from 2 a.m. until sunrise.

Serge Fontaine, 57, also woke up that night in time to see the burning garbage can outside the nightclub. It took some time before he realized that it was his bin — filled with debris from a home renovation — that had been set alight.

When Fontaine started looking around his property, he too noticed footprints in the snow. He told police. They followed the tracks through the backyards of many houses along the street across from the nightclub. From the rummaging and thefts that were discovered, the residents believe the person behind the blazes would have set out with little more than a lighter in hand, gathering the garbage and other flammable material as well as pilfering gas from the jerry cans that fuel peoples’ lawn mowers, snowblowers and all-terrain vehicles in order to start the fires.

From the houses, police were apparently able to follow the tracks along the side of the nightclub to where the burning garbage was discovered, and then a few hundred yards across the street to the Media Module building that was destroyed by the blaze.

By that afternoon, said Eid, his insurance adjuster informed him that police had identified a suspect in the fire by following the tracks in the snow to a trailer park right next door.

Fontaine, whose son was a childhood friend of Beaudry, said the firefighter was raised in the trailer park. He still lived there at the time of the fires.

It would be nearly eight months before police arrested Beaudry. He was formally suspended from the Richelieu fire service, which is comprised of about 30 volunteer firefighters, in late November.

A firefighter charged with arson is not a new phenomenon but, like a police officer accused of major crimes, it is a rare enough occurrence that people take notice. One of the earliest recorded cases mentioned in one study is a British farmer and volunteer firefighter who was executed for setting blazes over several years in the early 1830s. His motivation was the beer and money he received for his work.

As for modern research, the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s psychological profile says fire-setting firefighters are most likely to be white males between the ages of 17 and 25 and come from a broken or unstable home. They are of average or above-average intelligence and tend to be drawn to the fire service for the excitement.

It is personal for them — not a public service.

The notion of pyromaniacs being drawn to the profession as a way of getting intimate with the object of their fascination is overly romantic, the U.S. National Volunteer Fire Council noted in a 2011 study of the problem.

“The vast majority of offenders become arsonists after joining the fire service,” the organization says.

Figuring out why they do it is a more difficult challenge.

David Rouillard, a volunteer firefighter in Quebec’s Eastern Townships who was convicted on arson charges for fires he set in 2009, told the court that his poor self-esteem led him to the act. He wanted to be a hero. He ended up in jail.

In 2000, Sébastien Ménard, a 25-year-old volunteer firefighter near Trois-Rivieres, Que., went to prison for six years after admitting to setting fires to boost his modest wages.

In 1995, a retired York Region firefighter, Richard John Hayden, testified at his trial that he had suffered brain damage on the job and set a series of fires over several days in Milton to feel the rush and excitement of attacking a blaze.

“I was thinking it could be me still,” Hayden testified.

In short, there is no single overarching motivation, particularly for volunteer firefighters, said Montreal-based fire sleuth Alain Harvey, president of the Quebec chapter of the International Association of Arson Investigators.

“Often the reason is that they want to get out and ensure that they are making money because volunteer firefighters are paid by the hour. Sometimes they find it dull because there are no fires in the city.”